Parental Participation in Education

There is a growing body of literature about parental participation in education that tries to ascertain how parental involvement benefits children and to examine creative ways that schools can involve busy parents. In addition to seeking greater racial and economic diversity, she continues to emphasize the involvement of working parents: "Come in for just a day... Working parents have technical skills they could share with the classroom." Mindful of busy families, the PTA formally expanded its notion of participation by putting forth six "national standards" in 1997. Its new national standards for parental participation in education connect advocacy and school governance efforts to a broader framework of parental volunteering and encouraging children's study habits.

The National PTA has also been instrumental in helping to pass laws to protect children. In 1998 alone, the National PTA's legislative program supported the expansion of the Family and Medical Leave Act, supported federal legislation to enhance parental participation in education, and advocated increased drug-abuse prevention funding. In addition, the organization publishes a legislative newsletter on current issues and advocacy strategies and operates a toll-free hotline that provides information about federal legislation affecting children. Its Website provides links to congressional representatives, model letters members can send to Congress, and information on becoming more involved in advocacy.

In general, it would seem that New Labour has a very narrow conception of parental participation in education. This seems to have been largely reduced to an individualised conception of involvement. For New Labour, parental involvement seems to mean equipping parents, and where necessary forcing them, to be more responsible for and involved in their own children's learning, for example, through family learning schemes, home-school agreements, working with their children at home following school and DfES guidelines, and harsh penalties for truancy-a manifestation of what New Labour's first Secretary of State for Education, David Blunkett, has called 'tough love'. So it would seem that New Labour are happy to encourage citizens to share in limited forms of decision making but only on condition that they behave in what are deemed to be responsible ways. Effectively, this means endorsing what New Labour wants, which in some instances includes parents being made to accept a business 'takeover' of their schools.

The school decentralization experiments of the 1960s in cities like Detroit , New York , and Washington , D.C. , were, in their emphasis on community control and parental participation in education, clear examples of postreform ideals. Indeed, New York 's 1967 demonstration school district experiment was arguably the city's only direct experience with community control. Although the experiment was limited to three school districts, community control of schools in New York generated more intense political conflict than any other attempt at community empowerment in the city's history, mostly because of the wide sweep of issues and the high stakes involved in urban education policy.